But if outward conditions lacked variety, not so their cumulative effect upon poor human nature. A change was going on in the travellers that will little commend them to the sentimentalist.
"I've come to think a snow-storm's all right to travel in, all right to sleep in," said the Colonel one morning; "but to cook in, eat in, make or break camp in—it's the devil's champion invention." For three days they had worked like galley-slaves, and yet covered less than ten miles a day. "And you never get rested," the Colonel went on; "I get up as tired as I go to bed." Again the Boy only nodded. His body, if not his temper, had got broken into the trail, but for a talkative person he had in these days strangely little to say. It became manifest that, in the long run, the Colonel would suffer the most physically; but his young companion, having less patience and more ambition, more sheer untamed vitality in him, would suffer the most in spirit. Every sense in him was becoming numbed, save the gnawing in his stomach, and that other, even more acute ache, queer compound of fatigue and anger. These two sensations swallowed up all else, and seemed to grow by what they fed on.
The loaded sled was a nightmare. It weighed a thousand tons. The very first afternoon out from Anvik, when in the desperate hauling and tugging that rescued it from a bottomless snow-drift, the lashing slipped, the load loosened, tumbled off, and rolled open, the Colonel stood quite still and swore till his half-frozen blood circulated freely again. When it came to repacking, he considered in detail the items that made up the intolerable weight, and fell to wondering which of them they could do without.
The second day out from Anvik they had decided that it was absurd, after all, to lug about so much tinware. They left a little saucepan and the extra kettle at that camp. The idea, so potent at Anvik, of having a tea-kettle in reserve—well, the notion lost weight, and the kettle seemed to gain.
Two pairs of boots and some flannels marked the next stopping-place.
On the following day, when the Boy's rifle kept slipping and making a brake to hold back the sled, "I reckon you'll have to plant that rifle o' yours in the next big drift," said the Colonel; "one's all we need, anyway."
"One's all you need, and one's all I need," answered the Boy stiffly.
But it wasn't easy to see immediate need for either. Never was country so bare of game, they thought, not considering how little they hunted, and how more and more every faculty, every sense, was absorbed in the bare going forward.
The next time the Colonel said something about the uselessness of carrying two guns, the Boy flared up: "If you object to guns, leave yours."
This was a new tone for the Boy to use to the Colonel.